The Reform of the Bankruptcy Law provides new tools to SMEs and micro-enterprises to avoid the liquidation that have been examined in the conference How Does the Bankruptcy Reform Affect Spanish SMEs?, convened this Thursday, in Madrid, by the Spanish Confederation of Bankruptcy Small and Medium Enterprise, CEPYME, and which can be viewed at the following link
Inaugurated by the president of CEPYME, Mr. Gerardo Cuerva, the conference addressed technical issues of Law 16/2022, of September 5, on the Reform of the Consolidated Text of the Bankruptcy Law, in order to bring the new mechanisms offered to SMEs and, in this way, help small and medium-sized companies to avoid an unwanted bankruptcy.
Although it is premature to assess the potentiality of the bankruptcy reform to achieve goals such as reducing the processes that end in liquidation, the truth is that the new regulations modernize the system previously in force and arbitrate channels that allow the procedure to be removed from court, which a priori announces a decrease in the costs that companies will bear in comparison with the previous legal framework.
For this reason, CEPYME regrets that the reform did not arrive sooner and that Spain has been one of the EU countries lagging behind in the homogenization of the bankruptcy framework with the European environment, especially taking into account the impact on the thickening of the debt of the Spanish SMEs that brought about the restrictions decreed at the beginning of the pandemic.
From CEPYME, problems have been identified in the Bankruptcy Platform of the Ministry of Justice that should be corrected in the shortest possible time.
Spanish SMEs have suffered from a changing regulatory environment since March 2020 and, although they received 130,000 million euros in loans guaranteed by the ICO, this relief was temporary and now they must make returns just when labor costs and inflation are growing intensely.
Likewise, the bankruptcy moratorium provided temporary relief for SMEs, but, as the president of CEPYME qualifies, it had a “collateral effect” in the fact that many companies continued to operate despite going through a critical situation.
For his part, the magistrate and specialist in Commercial Law, Mr. Andrés Sánchez Magro, has called attention to how the previous legal framework caused around 99% of bankruptcies to end in liquidation, an extreme that CEPYME hopes will be able to stanch the new regulatory scheme. .
The latest official statistics, analyzed by CEPYME in the Synthetic Indicator of the Situation of SMEs (IPYME) corresponding to the fourth quarter of 2022, which will be published at the end of this month of March, mark a clear upward trend in the number of insolvency proceedings. creditors presented in the fourth quarter of 2022, reaching the total number of debtors insolvent to 5,544, which represents an increase of 86.4% compared to the same period of the previous year.
Of the total of 5,544 bankruptcies registered in the fourth quarter of 2022, 4,407 were from individuals and 1,137 from companies. The number of SMEs filed for bankruptcy rose 23.6% year-on-year in the fourth quarter of 2022, going from 753 bankruptcies registered between September and December 2021 to 931 in the same period of 2022.
The restructuring plan, an opportunity for indebted SMEs
These data do nothing more than support the idea that the employer must be prepared and anticipate a possible situation of insolvency, which is precisely what the new reform of the Bankruptcy Law seeks to offer, a tool to work through a Restructuring Plan, in taking measures to avoid reaching bankruptcy.
This new figure, analyzed by the partner of F&P Asesores, Jaime Fúster, during the day, can be erected as a powerful tool, a kind of retaining wall, that avoids the bankruptcy, in addition to including a series of advantages for the company regarding to the previous frame.
CYRE’s partner, Juan Rosillo-Daoiz, has analyzed the treatment of debt in the new legal context, as well as ways of optimizing resources to carry out operational and financial restructuring so that the acquisition of productive units (UPAs) becomes on a path to business survival.
The partner of F&P Asesores, Carlos Fernández-Pita has analyzed the abbreviated procedure established by the new law for the smallest companies, one of the most battered by the health crisis, the increase in the minimum interprofessional wage (SMI) and inflation